FILM REVIEW; Girlhood Chums, Rallying Round

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

Published: June 7, 2002

''Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood'' offers the pleasantly groggy sensation of sinking under a down quilt and being fussed over by a group of garrulous, high-strung women. Amid their collective chatter, which includes bursts of raucous laughter, enough fuming emotion erupts to slake the thirst of an undiscriminating drama queen.

But all the conflicts that erupt inside this comfort zone are of the sort that can eventually be resolved through teary-eyed confessions, spontaneous group therapy and avowals of love. If you suggested to any of the characters that the world might be about to end, the response would be a jovially dismissive ''Phooey.'' That's because the movie's languorous julep-and-crawfish Louisiana setting is so close to the heart of Oprahland. Despite the psychic fissures slicing up the landscape, there's no doubt that the center will continue to hold for generations to come. Oprahland, after all, is the world capital of domestic conflict resolution. No one is allowed to leave without a warm, reassuring hug.

Perhaps not since ''Steel Magnolias'' has Hollywood turned out a movie so resolutely for and about women. Like that movie, it flaunts the notion that the essence of true female grit, American style, is to be found in the South. In that bastion of traditional femininity, where visions of hoop skirts still dance in girls' heads, the women also develop stiff backbones.

The male characters remain subsidiary in a story, adapted from two novels by Rebecca Wells, whose theme is the healing of embattled mother-daughter relationships. Husbands and boyfriends cautiously tiptoe around the outskirts of the film, as if they had stumbled onto a quilting bee and were clueless as to the proper etiquette.

Unencumbered by macho heroics, the film gives the veteran underemployed actresses Fionnula Flanagan and Shirley Knight and the much-employed Maggie Smith (putting on a decent Southern drawl) a chance to do some scenery-chewing as spunky women in late middle age on a mission of mercy. The Ya-Ya Sisterhood consists of four lifelong friends who as children formed their own secret society and signed a blood oath of loyalty and friendship.

The heart of the story is an emotional rescue operation carried out decades later by three of the four -- Teensy (Ms. Flanagan), Necie (Ms. Knight) and Caro (Ms. Smith) -- to salvage the shipwrecked relationship of the fourth, Vivi (Ellen Burstyn), and her grown-up daughter, Sidda (Sandra Bullock). That bond is threatened when Vivi reads a Time magazine interview in which her daughter, a successful New York playwright, describes her mother as having been abusive. A furious phone call ends with both mother and daughter trying to smash their receivers.

In the first phase of the rescue effort, the conspirators fly to New York and surprise Sidda, who is living with a boyfriend, Connor (Angus MacFadyen), whom she loves but is reluctant to marry. Taking Sidda out to a restaurant, they knock her out with a drugged cocktail and spirit her back to Louisiana for some serious consciousness-raising. Phase 2 finds Sidda force-fed a crash course in her own family history, which has been recorded, along with the other sisters' adventures, in an ornate scrapbook.

The movie, directed by Callie Khouri, who wrote the screenplay, unfolds as a tricky (and sometimes confusing) exercise in time travel with scenes ricocheting through three different eras. Although we observe Vivi as a very young child being fought over by parents who hate each other's guts, most of the flashing back and forth compares the aging Vivi with the same character as a young mother (Ashley Judd). As Sidda absorbs Vivi's biography, she begins to understand and to forgive.

This big, blowzy movie, which opens today nationwide, is more concerned with sustaining a mood of cute chin-up sentimentality than with connecting its dramatic dots. Ms. Burstyn turns in the most focused performance as a vain, self-dramatizing diva underneath whose tantrums beats a tender heart. The actress has always had sure instinct for locating her characters' humanity, and what she finds in Vivi is a luminous, aching fragility.

But the psychological and dramatic connections between the older and the younger Vivi don't track. Even with tears in her eyes, Ms. Judd's neurotic, frustrated young mother conveys a forbiddingly steely chill that is nowhere to be found in Ms. Burstyn's weepy bubble bath. It's inconceivable that one could melt into the other.

The familial connection between Vivi and her daughter feels just as tenuous. Although Ms. Bullock's Sidda gets top billing and the star exudes her usual down-to-earth likability, the character doesn't have enough screen time to emerge as anything more than an angry grown-up child who begins to soften under the sisterhood's education program. Strangely, Sidda, who was born in Louisiana, has shed any traces of a Southern accent.

For all its failed connections, ''Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood'' is nurturing, in a gauzy, dithering way. Its upbeat attitude could be summed up in the title of another recent sudsfest cut from the same sopping piece of fabric: hope floats.

''Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood'' is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some strong language and scenes of children being beaten.

DIVINE SECRETS OF THE YA-YA SISTERHOOD

Directed by Callie Khouri; written by Ms. Khourie, with adaptation by Mark Andrus, based on the novels ''Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood'' and ''Little Altars Everywhere'' by Rebecca Wells; director of photography, John Bailey; edited by Andrew Marcus; musical score by David Mansfield and T-Bone Burnett; production designer, David J. Bomba; produced by Bonnie Bruckheimer and Hunt Lowry; released by Warner Brothers. Running time: 110 minutes. This film is rated PG-13.